The British Library recently teamed up with Wikimedia Commons to digitize more than 3,000 images from The British Library Colonial Copyright Collection, a London, England-based collection of Canadian photographs from 1895 and 1924. In a continuing series, the National Post presents the collections’ greatest hits.
In this edition: Disasters. Canada was an expanding, rapidly industrializing country in the early 20th century. But with every new rail line, gold rush or settlement, circumstances demanded a regular tithe of deadly disasters.
For Victorian-era Canadian cities, regularly burning to the ground was basically a rite of passage, which would help to explain our cultural reverence for the firefighting profession. In this 1899 image, a photographer captures the eerie glow cast by the downtown core of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia as it succumbs to a devastating blaze.
In June, 1903, an artillery train derailed while passing through Enterprise, Ont., violently flinging cannons and railway carriages into surrounding homes and farms. Keep in mind that cleaning up these disasters was particularly difficult in an era before easy access to mobile, heavy machinery. Once the military had finished taking snapshots of the weaponry-strewn landscape, they would have needed to scare up some draft horses and work gangs to begin the long process of carting it away.
Aside from the myriad other hazards of being a Northern Ontario miner in 1911, sometimes workers had to contend with the very forces of hell sweeping in upon them. This was the scene in July of 1911—at the height of the Timmins-area Porcupine Gold Rush — when the surrounding forest erupted into a sky-blackening inferno and surged over the countryside with the speed of a galloping horse. Seventy one people and more than 200,000 hectares of wilderness would not be able to escape the sweeping devastation.
This eerie photo shows the final minutes of the original Centre Block of Parliament as it is destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. Even as it became consumed by flames, Victoria Tower still struck the hour at midnight. It then collapsed about 30 minutes later, minutes after this image was captured.
In January, 1913, the S.S. Cheslakee had just pulled out from Van Anda, B.C. when it ran into heavy weather, dislodging cargo and causing the ship to list badly to one side. Cpt. John Cockle had just managed to limp the ship back to port when it began to list and sink, drowning seven people trapped in its flooding interior. This photo was taken just as salvage crews prepared to refloat the stricken vessel.
It may look like the aftermath of a wartime carpet bombing, but this is Toronto after the most devastating fire in the city’s history. Breaking out on April 9, 1904, the blaze would ultimately destroy 104 buildings during its nine hour tear through the downtown core. Amazingly, the fire itself did not claim a single victim, save for English immigrant John Croft, who was killed by an explosion while clearing debris from the inferno.
Taken in 1911, this image appears to depict the aftermath of the collapse of a grain elevator in Laura, Saskatchewan. Although grain elevators are a favourite theme of prairie postcards, the monumental structures are also rife with dangers. To this day, the slightest spark can kick off a devastating explosion of the flammable grain dust and the grain itself functions as a deadly quicksand that can swallow and suffocate any worker unlucky enough to fall in.
Soon after this photo was taken, the speeding locomotive it depicts was involved in the 1902 Wanstead Disaster, one of the deadliest rail accidents in Canadian history. In an evening blizzard on Boxing Day, the Pacific Express passenger train slammed head-on into a lumbering freight train outside the town of Wanstead, Ontario. “Then there was a loud crashing sound as the two trains met, a piercing shriek that just seemed to go on and on for such a long time,” reported one witness, who happened to be walking home when the crash occurred. Thirty one people died, and dozens more spent hours trapped in the wreckage and at the mercy of the elements until help could arrive.
There was apparently never a Canadian disaster so horrible that locals still couldn’t gather together to strike an “album cover” pose in the wreckage. This is the aftermath of the 1906 Azilda train wreck, which killed 12 people. And, just like the Wanstead Disaster, it involved a head-on collision between two trains. Trains in 1906 were uniquely sturdy machines with almost no semblance of a “crumple zone,” meaning that any force of an impact would be shunted all the way to the caboose, with disastrous results for the passengers inside.
This was the scene in 1917 when a coal mine explosion killed 65 men. Weeping crowds surrounded the pit mouth as bodies were pulled up and volunteers descended underground to perform the deadly task of searching for survivors. Due to the deadly gases still lingering in the mine, some of the rescuers would be added to the dead by day’s end. As a vivid account from the Winnipeg Free Press reporter wrote, “a number of the rescued miners were driven temporarily insane by the explosion, and the gas which swept through the mine. In some cases they had to be put under restraint in order to protect them from their own violence.”